The Man and The Outlaw

Chapter Twelve

There wasn't even a hint of hesitation from Walker when Clara woke him to offer her proposition. He merely yawned, nodded his head and began to pack up quietly. Again, she admired his dedication to her.
They left quickly, before the sun and Mae had much time to rise. Loren saw them off, waving with his good arm from the front porch steps as they rode away. Clara had the strangest feeling as the little gray house fell out of view behind them that things would never be the same from this point on. They were off, headed towards something that would change her life forever once again, regardless of the outcome. It could only end a handful of ways.
As they walked their horses, Clara explained their course to Walker, taking special care to remember everything that Gloria Valdez had confided in them.
The Riverton Quarry was on the east side of a town called Riverport. There was no port there and hardly a river, but a thing's name could be misleading without always meaning to she supposed. It would be a three-day ride from Spencer to Riverport along the Montgomery Trail and it would take them through towns by the names of Kessinger and Driscoll. They would be able to find decent lodgings in Kessinger, mostly avoid any trouble, she figured but Driscoll...
"Driscoll's bad news, you know? Especially for you," Walker said once she'd finished telling him the plan. They rode steadily side-by-side, so close she could've reached out and grabbed his hand if she wanted to.
"I've heard the stories," she shrugged. "It's all talk."
Walker scoffed at her, shaking his head, and tipped his hat back on his head with one hand. She could feel him staring at her.
"What?"
"This whole trip is based on 'talk', isn't it?" he pointed out. "There's the talk from that Warren kid in the cage, talk from an old lady with a coincidental last name who's also a little out of her mind. Heck, The Outlaw Valdez is probably only as big and bad as he is because everybody talks about him, and nobody can catch him to see for themselves. There's no telling what's really true and what's complete bull. He's a man behind a curtain for all we know.
"Now, we've got talk about Driscoll, talk that says if we try and get through that town, they'll stop us and kill us because of those marks you've got under that scarf, and you don't even want to consider it? Don't you think we should take that a little seriously?" he asked her.
Clara fidgeted with the scarf around her neck and pretended to be unbothered.
"We'll deal with Driscoll when we get there," she replied curtly. She saw no use in worrying about something that was two days off.
"They cut peoples' tongues out, Clara. Your kind of people. They stop strangers at city limits and check them for anything 'suspicious.' We're not going to be able to just ride on through," he told her sternly.
There was concern on his face, concern for her more than for himself she thought. He was worried she'd get them into something and get herself caught and killed. Clara felt a brief moment of satisfaction that he was worried about her, but she buried it with a fistful of pride and stuck out her chin stubbornly.
"I don't care about some town full of psychopaths who think they can maim every Silvertongue they come across. They won't scare me off, Walk," she said. "I'm getting to Riverport and I'm going to catch Hector Valdez, or I'll die trying."
Walker looked like he wanted to say more but he didn't, and they rode along in silence for some time.
The trip to Kessinger was a mostly silent one, both in action and conversation. There was no sight of any more of Todd Pryor's men, no occasion to even think about drawing a pistol. They passed a few wagons and other groups of people on horseback, but everyone kept to themselves and went along without more than few words of greeting spoken between them. It was nearly midnight when they reached their first stop and Clara was beginning to think that the trip had started out awfully quiet, much too quiet to last long.
There was only one lodge house in Kessinger, The Sparrow's Nest according to the sign out front. It was small and by no means extravagant but after a full day of riding, their bodies still and achy from the saddle, Clara and Walker were glad to see it. Walker took their horses and paid the stable boy to keep them overnight while Clara went into the main building to check for rooms with the sleepy-eyed lobby man. Walker met back up with her when he was finished, stomping dust off his boots before coming in, though the carpets looked like they wouldn't have minded the dirt much anyway.
"Take off the scarf," the lobby man ordered as Walker walked up beside Clara at the front desk. The man's eyes had taken on a sharper, cynical look and Clara saw that he had left a good berth of room between himself and the desk, widening the gap between them. She wondered if he realized that he could've been across the room and, as long as he could hear her, it wouldn't have made a difference.
Clara was too tired to even feel much resentment for the man. She sighed heavily and reached for the scarf around her neck, hoping that he would still allow them to have a room after he saw her marks and proved his point. Before she could grab hold of the material though, Walker had taken hold of her hands and stopped them.
"She ain't showing you anything. You got a room or not?" he snapped. His neck was sunburned from the long ride and his face was weary, but his pale blue eyes shone with a righteous fire.
The lobby man narrowed his own beady eyes and wrinkled his nose at Walker, none too keen at the tone in which he'd been spoken to.
"This is a decent establishment sir. We have every right to—"
"Well then, I'm sure any place so decent would never ask a woman to remove something she's wearing. What's the matter with you?" Walker snarled, releasing Clara's hands to plant his firmly on the front desk, causing the lobby man to flinch.
"Me?" the man sputtered.
His eyes flicked from Walker's face to the phone on the desk beside his right hand. One call to the local station was all it would take, and their quest would be sent off the rails before it even got rightly started. Clara would be arrested for refusing a request to show status and she would suffer the consequences of an insubordinate Silvertongue (imprisonment, forcible sedation, total glossectomy like the folks in Driscoll were so fond of) but worse than that, she would never get the chance to face Valdez and make him answer for what he'd done to her father.
The thought to use her abilities on the man crossed her mind, but she shoved it away as quickly as it came. To do that and persuade the man to do what he obviously did not want to would do nothing but confirm the fears about her kind that he obviously already held to. Unlike the sheriff at the prison where the Warren brothers were held, they had no prior deal that Clara felt obligated to make him uphold for honor of his word. If she chose to use her voice now, she would prove to be exactly what he thought she was.
Walker's hand had slipped off the desktop and was inching closer to his gun, anger and frustration blatant on his face. This time, it was Clara who stopped him.
"Look," she began timidly in her normal voice, "we just need one night. We'll be out of your hair so early tomorrow that you'll never even know we'd been and gone."
The man looked as though he was going to deny her, his jaw tightening ever so slightly, and then his features relaxed a little and he let out a heavy breath. He turned his back on them and fumbled around for a room key, finding it and handing it to Walker forcefully, careful not the let any part of their fingers touch.
"Enjoy your stay," he grunted in a strangled sort of voice.
Clara opened her mouth to thank him but Walker was already striding away from the desk quickly, reaching the door in three stiff steps, and she merely nodded her gratitude at the man before hurrying to catch up to him. His hands were balled into fists as she watched him walk in front of her, his shoulders tense and his steps heavy. She followed him along the outside of the building where doors lined the walkway, each painted red with a little black number in the center above the peephole. He stopped in front of the one marked with a number four and jammed the key so hard into the lock that she worried he'd snap it right off.
"It's not a big deal, Walker," she told him as he swung the door open and held it, letting her enter ahead of him. "We got the room, didn't we?"
"That's not the point," he grumbled, dropping himself into a wooden chair that was pushed against the wall beside the door. "That guy had no reason to ask you to reveal yourself. You weren't threatening him, you weren't causing trouble. We just wanted a room like anybody else who comes in here."
"People are allowed to ask, Walk. It's just how it goes," she shrugged.
"I didn't ask," he told the floor. "I didn't care."
She smiled, flattered by his taking the offense for her and remembering the first day they'd met.
"Yeah, well, you're not like most people then. Most people care, even if they don't have the guts to ask," she said, still smiling down at him affectionately.
"That don't make it right. They're just afraid of you, that's it. They're a bunch of cowards who don't even bother to get to know you before they judge you. Most Silvertongues would never dream of abusing their powers on people," he said loudly, his voice bouncing off the walls of the small room around them. Clara wondered if all the talk of Driscoll had been weighing on his mind, building into this frustration he was now venting with great fervor.
He looked up for the first time and surveyed the little room with growing confusion. Clara looked around too, noticing immediately what was wrong.
"I'm sorry, Clara," he muttered a little sheepishly, the anger falling out of his tone in an instant. "I didn't realize this room would only have the one bed...I meant for him to give us one with two...I...well, he's just going to have to give us a different one."
Walker stood up and spun for the door, but Clara called him back, trying not to chuckle and offend him in his current state.
"We barely got this one out of him. It'll work for one night," she told him.
"I'll take the floor," he offered, eyeing the thinly carpeted ground with little enthusiasm.
"Bed's perfectly big enough for both of us," Clara pointed out casually. "You stay on your side, and I'll stay on mine. That way, I won't have to listen to you complaining about your back pain all day tomorrow."
Walker insisted on sleeping on top of the covers, not wanting to intrude on Clara's personal space accidentally, and Clara was too tired to care or object. She crawled into the bed, hugging her side of the mattress so Walker had plenty of room, and fell quickly into a deep sleep.
She was awoken a few hours late by Walker's harsh coughs in the darkness. He threw his legs off the side of the bed and sat up, his whole body tensing as he forced out several hard coughs, trying in vain to smother them with both hands. He got to his feet and left the room, Clara hearing him try hard to close the door softly as he went.
She listened for him as she lay there, his coughs muffled but still audible through the thin outer wall. She began to worry as she heard what she thought was retching replace the forceful coughing noise. It didn't seem like his "chest cold" was going away any time soon. In fact, it seemed to be getting worse. Selfishly, she wondered if bringing him along had been a mistake.
After about twenty minutes, he snuck back into the room, seeming to have gotten himself back under control. He lay down gently on the other side of the bed and she listened as his breathing slowed and fell into a quiet rhythm.
Clara lay awake, staring up at the ceiling fan that twirled slowly above their head. Walker back asleep and apparently feeling a little better, her thoughts drifted to the journey before them, the task of catching Valdez. She'd said from the outset that she wanted to catch The Outlaw and bring him in, see that he was hanged for his crimes, for the murder of her father. She believed that was still what she wanted. However, David Warren had said that Valdez was dying. That bit of information, although hopeful in seeking him out, scared her.
If Valdez were really dying, he might not live long enough to see a rightful death. He might slip neatly from her fingers in the final moments, rescued from justice by The Reaper himself atop his dark horse. It would be a one-way ticket to Hell for him, of that she was sure, but it would also be the cruelest ending to this journey that Clara could imagine.
Haunted by that possibility, Clara had to consider another, more conflicting option. If they caught Valdez while he was still alive, would she be able to carry out the sentence herself before The Reaper had his chance? Should she if given the opportunity?
If it came to a firefight, she had no qualms about putting him down. She'd done that sort of thing before, and it was different when it was you or them. That came down to survival, self-defense. If he was dying anyway, Valdez might just roll over, give himself up and let her come. If that turned out to be the case, she didn't know how she'd react. She'd never killed anybody in cold blood before and it was something she couldn't trick herself into taking lightly. Killing like that, it did something to a person. It changed you, right down to your very core. All she wanted was justice for her father, to do right by him. Problem was, if she murdered Valdez (and a small part of her almost wanted to), would she become someone her father wouldn't have approved of, someone he might not even recognize? Would she be punching that one-way ticket to the hot place for herself?
She wished her father was here to tell her what to do, what the right choice was. Of course, if he was there, she'd never be camped in a little hotel room with a near stranger, packing pistols and chasing outlaws. Life was funny sometimes.
Walker began to mumble in his sleep and Clara rolled over to see if he would wake himself up again. She hoped that he wouldn't. He was looking worse and worse all the time and he needed as much rest as he could get. They would have to be on high alert when they got closer to Driscoll, she was not naive about the danger that the place posed. She thought it would prove to be one of the most dangerous legs of the journey yet.
"Don't shoot," he murmured, almost too quietly for her to hear even as close as they were. He was turned on his side, facing her, his forehead creased as he dreamed. She could feel him twitching on top of the blanket.
There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead, and she wondered if he might've come down with a fever. She couldn't feel the heat on him yet, but it probably wouldn't take long. His eyes darted back and forth beneath their lids as whatever nightmare he was trapped in played out before them.
The window behind her let in moonlight between its shades, casting the bed in a pale glow. Walker's face, half obscured by her shadow, suddenly looked different to her. It was a trick of the darkness that deepened his features and gave his shadowed face the look that he'd sprouted facial hair almost instantaneously. It reminded her of the first day she and Loren had spotted him, riding atop that blonde pony. It had turned out to be nothing but the shade of his hat and as she lay flat on the bed, allowing the light to cast his full face in its glow, she found the same sensation as before. He was just as she had known him to be, but that strangeness clung to her as the darkness deepened in the room and her weariness returned. For just a moment, he had looked like a completely different person.
"I didn't do it...Leave me alone, please," he slurred, jerking one arm up in the air as if he were warding off an attacker. She reached a hand out and took his arm, eased it back down to the bed gently and patted it a few times to calm him.
"It's alright Walk," she whispered in a soothing tone. "It's alright. It's just a dream."
"I'm not...believe me...I can't," he grumbled and then turned over onto his other side, putting his back to her.
Clara wondered what he was seeing, who he was talking to. There was so much she didn't yet know about him, so many questions left unanswered. To ask them, however, seemed counterproductive, almost disrespectful to what this trip was about. This wasn't about getting to know one another, hitting it off, becoming friends, or more than. This trip was about putting the world right, about avenging her father by making the man who killed him finally pay for what he'd done. That was it. That was all she could allow herself to focus on.
Clara drifted off to sleep then and dreamed that she and Walker were strolling hand in hand down a gravel road. Walker was whistling a tune beside her, an old country song she couldn't quite place, and Clara pointed off in the distance where a pear tree grew along the road. The wind blew through its limbs and leaves, making it look as though the tree were waving to them.